The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper by Ortega Tony

Author:Ortega, Tony [Ortega, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781909269309
Publisher: Silvertail Books
Published: 2015-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

11

Locked doors and fake IDs

On September 16, 1975, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York filed a nolle prosequi to end the prosecution of Paulette Cooper. She had, a year earlier, fulfilled the requirement that she get psychiatric counseling since her trial had been put off at the end of October 1973. “Under the circumstances, the government does not believe that further prosecution of Paulette Marcia Cooper is necessary or in the public interest,” the government’s document read.

Her case was now officially over. But she worried that there was still a cloud over her. It was still possible that a newspaper might learn that she’d been indicted. She still couldn’t really relax. But she continued to see Dr. Herbert Benglesdorf, well after she had been required to do so to fulfill her end of the bargain with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

She wanted his advice about Roland, a Jewish Marcello Mastroianni look-alike with a French accent who had been born in Eastern Europe, lived for a while in Israel, then for many years in Montreal before moving to New York. He had a PhD and worked as the chief financial officer of a major corporation.

Roland had spotted Paulette when she moved into the Churchill late in 1972 – he had received the smear letter about her planted by Scientologists, but he didn’t connect it with the attractive young woman he noticed around the building. Later he admitted that he would hang around the mail room hoping for a glimpse of her, but she was too preoccupied to notice.

She told Benglesdorf that she had met Roland at a party in the building early in 1975. The party was at the apartment of her friend Sandy, who worked in advertising as an account executive and had known Paulette since her BBDO days.

That night at Sandy’s someone was playing the album from the musical revue Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris over and over. The songs, in French and written by a Belgian, were significant and intoxicating for her, she told Benglesdorf, and she fell in love with the music and with Roland, who spoke the language.

She was charmed, and fell hard. That summer, she turned 33, and for the first time since she was with Bob Straus, she began to think seriously about marriage. Roland was sophisticated and funny, and he helped her to forget that she had been through so much harassment, she told Benglesdorf. She said that the three of them – Roland, Barbara Lewis, and herself – were each damaged in their own way, and they joked about it. Barbara had never really recovered from her attack. Paulette was still damaged from her indictment and the ongoing harassment.

And Roland, it was becoming increasingly clear, drank too much.

Paulette began to suspect it when she would hear his refrigerator door open and close after she rang his doorbell. When he wasn’t looking, she’d open it and see the only thing in it was a glass of wine.

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